The latest NHK-series: Telepathy Shoujo Ran, a charming mystery shoujo series about the titular character who is blessed with the gift of telepathy, among others. With Yoshiiro Ike’s soundtrack, it features an adaptation of a set of children’s novels; it had the potential to be either a fun little series or a gigantic flop. Thankfully it became the former.

However, you do need to realize that you do not want to watch this series because of its mystery part. The different stories that are presented throughout the series aren’t exactly bad, but they don’t stand out either. They’re often cheesy, involve Ran&co mostly by coincidences or suffer from overmoralistic confession speeches. They’re just… there; in order to support what really makes this series stand out.

What really made me return to this series for every single week is the cast of characters, and then especially the banter that occurs between them. The four lead characters form an excellent team that’s always fun to watch. While this series is not strictly a comedy, there were enough hilarious moments between them, and this remains through the entire length of the series. Hardly any attempt at a joke falls flat. Overall, the point where this series excels at is in fleshing out its characters. Even when there’s no comedy, the creators and the lead characters manage to keep everything going along smoothly to prevent the viewer from getting bored.

The graphics in this series are also pretty decent. Even though there’s lots of epilepsy-inducing CG, characters move smooth and their facial expressions show a very wide range of subtle emotions. It makes use of very bright and varied colours, which makes for a very aesthetically pleasing series. Ike Yoshihiro’s soundtrack also brings this series to life, even though it may not be among his best works.

Overall, expect anything from the story here and you will be disappointed, but nevertheless this series managed to achieve what it set out to do: despite the storylines that usually fail to capture, it’s a continuously fun series from beginning to end. Ran, Rui, Rin and Midori are a set of wonderful characters, with especially wonderful banter between them.

Storytelling:

7/10

Characters:

9/10

Production-Values:

8/10

Setting:

8/10

Leave a Reply

Shoutbox

Name:

Email:

For:

Mail will not be published

( Sending... )

;(

(Sunday, Aug 2. 2015 09:47 PM)

@Masky: Are you talking about me?
Because if you are, you completely misread all I wrote…
But if that’s the case I don’t feel like explaining myself considering you probably don’t want to listen anyway…

Masky

(Sunday, Aug 2. 2015 02:09 PM)

Geez, people really make odd excuses when defending stuff they like ._.
…I feel like thats probably hypocritical comment coming from me since I’ve probably done that too, but I think I usually go with attitude of “Hey, you’d probably not like it anyway, but I think you are wrong about that thing” xD

Emma

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 09:47 PM)

@Aidan: I would recommend downloading it rather than browser-playing it as my browser kept crashing when I tried to.
Its quite short but it gives a great teaser and introduction to the game, that gets me excited for it.

Emma

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 09:45 PM)

@Aidan: Mangagamer have released the demo for kara no shoujo 2, they’ve also confirmed a release for Autumn. Its probably better to call this demo more of a prologue/compliment to the game with content exclusive to it.
Demo/prologue here: http://mangagamer.org/kns2/

AidanAK47

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 02:14 PM)

@invicableGod, Yep that comment was spam. Should have got rid of it first time I saw it.

Wicked

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:10 AM)

well, this place changed a lot. Gotta say, I’m not a fan of how they adapted GATE into an anime. It feels too decompressed. Manga did a better job at keeping the tension taut

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:08 AM)

Also I am not the blog, I’m just a poster… I really hope you have enough sense to tell the difference…

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:07 AM)

@Emo: you’re saying all that like that doesn’t fit your description to a T. Kinda sad actually…
Well I guess now at least I gave you one more thing to get angry about so your day seems just a bit more active than your last.

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:03 AM)

I don’t think people are really expected to read it from the start anymore. I mean that’s probably why it stays popular in Japan considering people would have to be in their 20s at least to keep up from the start without reading hundreds of chapters just to keep up.

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:00 AM)

Well admittly comics don’t seem to be that easy to follow (don’t actually read comics despite liking a lot of DC and marvel media), but anyway it’s not like the other long-running shounens in terms of continuity and more like the long-running comedies like say Kochikoma.

Featured Posts

Not much to talk about this episode as it was mainly set up to the next. The army’s reputation looks to have risen after driving off a dragon and looks to have caught the attention of our new female character. I was about to sigh when I saw the old anime staple of a bath […]

Here it is, a flashback to the beginning of the outbreak. In a market as over saturated with zombie media as ours it’s rather hard to do this kind of story without treading on old ground. The start of the outbreak is the focal point of every beginning for a zombie movie. Rarely is it […]

I have said it before but these twilight characters rub me the wrong way. This group of superhuman individuals just sticks out like a sore thumb in a grounded setting such as this. They are a Shounen element in a otherwise Seinien show so when they come out and start leaping on rooftops this just […]

This episode introduces what looks to be the main trio of girls for the cast. A elf girl, a mage girl and a Goth lolita girl with a giant axe. The Goth lolita, otherwise know as the Apostle of a death god, Rory is so far the most interesting of the bunch. Though mainly because […]

I really don’t understand Mangalobe’s thinking on this changes, for you see this episode was an adaption of the second chapter in the manga. I don’t see the reason why they felt that they needed to mix around the order of these episodes but I suppose it’s no harm done. To be honest I found […]

So despite saying I would cover Chaos Dragon in my summer preview, I have decided to cover this instead. The reasons for this is simple, the obvious one being that Chaos Dragon is a poorly written, badly animated and jarring mess of an anime. But the main reason is that after the second episode […]

This episode was certainly stronger than the first as Itami’s otaku tendencies were cut down and the focus was more on the conflict. The fight itself was brilliantly portrayed as we saw it mainly from the side of the other world. In the beginning when they were marching towards the army they were assured of […]

As this show continues the Black Lagoon vibes only get stronger but this episode did present an issue. Namely the supernaturally strong dog tag soldiers which can jump ten feet into the air and pull out road signs. In a series that at least started fairly set in reality these elements are somewhat odd though […]

The second season of Sidonia makes a number of mistakes that a lot of second seasons do. That namely being that the anime slows down and introduces characters and conflicts that are often resolved in a undetermined to exist, third season. A new antagonist is introduced, whom does very little in the season and only […]

Latest Reviews

I wonder when it was that a film being childish became a flaw. As a medium grows it takes steps to aim to mature itself and seek a more intellectual level of presenting entertainment. Animation did it as Anime aimed to explore terrontry that cartoons refuse to explore and video games only recently broke away […]

For a long time now this adaption has been the dreams of many a Fate fan with many believing it would never come to pass, but now that it is here is it everything that we dreamed? Short answer to this is no, long answer is nearly. I feel this show will have many divided […]

When you see a harem anime and sigh as the breasts of the female lead jiggle with every step and wind that can flip a skirt it’s easy to forget that somewhere in Japan a group of people worked hard to get that jiggle right and draw each frame of animation. The hardships of the […]

Let me talk a bit about Ryousuke Nakamura. For a long time, this guy was my hero. He started off as an assistant director to Monster, in my opinion a big reason why that series got such a ridiculously solid adaptation, and then in 2008 he came with the groundbreaking Mouryou no Hako. No TV-series […]

Okay, so I didn’t want to exit 2013 without having seen Masaaki Yuasa’s Kick Heart. It’s only twelve minutes anyway, and I consider him to be one of the best anime directors out there. The story here is pretty silly and mostly serves as a backdrop, so I mostly want to talk about the nature […]

Everyone’s taste is different, and that’s a wonderful thing because that allows us to have so many different forms of media that all aim toward their own niche. My blog is obviously written from the perspective of my own taste, and even when a show doesn’t cater to it (which is nearly always), I love […]

Noucome! You do not want to know how long I have been waiting for a series like this. More than half a decade, at the very least. Finally a series comes along and puts the incredibly overused harem genre in its place. And it actually does it well. Thank you! So to elaborate: the harem […]

Normally I try to avoid spoilers with these reviews, but screw it, it’s Pokemon. Pokemon The Origin is a bomb of nostalgia. If you haven’t played Pokemon Red, Blue or Green, then you will not enjoy this one slight bit. This really is made as pure undilluted fanservice for the fans of the first games. […]

I’m not going to dedicate a post for my impression for the final three episodes of this series. It was just too boring to write much about. I guess that that gives a pretty accurate indication of what I think about this series. Right at the start of Tamayura’s second season, I asked one question: […]